synaptics – A Stay At Home Dad

Oh for F!@#$%’s sake.

Another update to the xserver and my touchpad is broken. After googling for about 10 minutes, I come up with this thread from just a few days ago. Apparently udev configuration is out and the xorg.conf is back in.

This is definitely a weak point in open source stuff. Changes like this should be documented better or some kind of warning or explanation that current configuration techniques are about to be broken should be available.

I suppose this is what I get for using the ‘testing’ distro.

UPDATE:

Here’s the relevant section to add to xorg.conf:

Section "InputClass"
    Identifier  "Synaptics"
    driver      "synaptics"
    MatchProduct    "ETPS/2"
    MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event9"
    Option      "VertEdgeScroll"    "1"
    Option      "MaxSpeed"      "1"
    Option      "AccelFactor"       "0.05"
    Option      "TapButton1"        "1"
    Option      "TapButton2"        "2"
    Option      "TapButton3"        "3"
EndSection

See the InputClass section of the xorg.conf man page.

UPDATE II:

The two Match lines can be replaced with a MatchIsTouchpad "1" line. I don’t know if this is better or not- but it seems like it might be preferrable since InputClass sections are applied to anything that matches according to the man page. At least it’s limited to touchpads this way.

Debian EEE Touchpad and udev

My touchpad stopped working the other day on the EEE. I had’t the faintest clue as to why. The kernel had updated to 2.6.32-trunk and I knew that wasn’t the cause. When that update happened, I specifically tested the touchpad to make sure the synaptics driver was recognized.

Luckily, there is the DebianEEEWiki.

I remembered that the Xserver had indeed been updated, but at the time I didn’t note any of the details. So I checked on the version that’s running and sure enough its 1.7. So apparently the new and improved way is to use udev.

Well, I entered the the example file, with my own modifications of course, and still didn’t get any love. So I shutdown X and restarted it. Still nothing. I restarted udev, even though I know it’s unnecessary, and still nothing. Finally I shut things down and went to bed. Trouble shooting while dealing with a concussion is not a good combination.

Tonight I fired it up and the touchpad is working fine. Don’t know what service or daemon needed to be restarted, but apparently the reboot got it. Back to normal EEE use. At least I don’t have to muck with it any further.